15 February 2018 1:52 PM

I am terribly bored by the EU issue, which seems to me to be shadow-boxing while the two sides work out how much strength they really have, and can realistically use, and the negotiations move slowly towards the final weeks in which all will necessarily be resolved in a messy and unexciting compromise.

So let us have some history instead. I am constantly fascinated and appalled by the pseudo-religion which now surrounds the late Sir Winston Churchill, especially in the United States. A US Navy destroyer is named after him (though as ‘USS Winston S. Churchill, not ‘USS Sir Winston Churchill’). An entire Wren Church, St Mary Aldermanbury, destroyed in the London Blitz, has been transported piece by piece to Fulton, Missouri, and re-erected there in his memory.

Outside that Church is one of many more or less frightful sculptures of the great man, graven images which dot the Land of the Free. Not to mention the famous bust which sometimes is, and sometimes is not, kept in the Oval Office in the White House. Though quite why we should be pleased to see it there, I do not myself know, having observed the chilly non-existence of the ‘Special Relationship’ at close quarters in 1993-95.

Actually, Churchill was not especially sentimental about the USA, a country he knew far better than most British politicians, from many visits over many years (and also because his mother was American). I believe he understood perfectly well, in 1940, that his decision to fight on would make us, thereafter, an American vassal state. I also believe he quite rightly believed this better than the alternative, which would have been (at best) a dingy future as a played-out and disarmed empire on the fringe of a Europe controlled by either Hitler or Stalin (or perhaps both of them)

While researching my forthcoming book The Phoney Victory I was looking for a quotation I had recently seen but not noted, from Clementine Churchill, in which (as I recall) she warned him against hoping for too much from the Americans.

I couldn’t find it. But I did find two other interesting quotations. One was a 1927 cabinet memorandum, in which the then Chancellor of the Exchequer was discussing American attempts to build up their Navy’s cruiser fleet to rival Britain’s. Churchill, who had actually been on US soil in 1895 when a very bitter dispute broke out between the two countries over the Venezuelan border with what was then British Guiana, had no illusions about the two countries being naturally friendly. He wrote ‘We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India, or Egypt, or Canada, or on any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled’ (Quoted in 'Churchill and America', Martin Gilbert, Free Press (Simon and Schuster) London and NY 2005, p. 104. The source is ‘Cruisers And Parity’, Cabinet Memorandum 20 July 1927, Cabinet Papers.

Of course Churchill knew perfectly well that the USA would, once it had the power, use it to ease us out of all these spheres. Which it duly did.

The thing that remains in doubt is this. Had Britain been more careful about when and how it entered a European war after Munich, would its power and wealth have survived for longer? Or was our rapid decline into insignificance, which has dominated my own lifetime, inevitable?

Churchill's assumed ‘shoulder to shoulder’ view of the USA was also not wholehearted during the 1940 crisis. His close aide John (‘Jock’) Colville recorded him growling, on 19th May 1940 ‘Here's a telegram for those bloody Yankees!’ (Gilbert p. 186, Gilbert's note refers to Colville Papers for 19th May 1940).

Churchill’s worshippers may believe in a sentimental special relationship. Their hero was far too clever and well-informed to do so.

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03 December 2017 1:24 AM

Our education system teaches the young what to think, not how to think. And if you ever wonder why so many things don’t work properly any more, or why you can’t get any sense out of so many organisations, this is one of the main reasons.

But it’s also getting harder and harder to think or say certain things. This week I experienced this mixture of brainwashing and propaganda at two different ends of the system.

I was sent a rather sinister questionnaire given to new arrivals at a secondary school I won’t name.

And I was the target of a bizarre and rather sad counter-demonstration at one of Oxford’s most exalted colleges. They are, in a way, connected.

The questionnaire is part of what has now become PSHCE, Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education. It is not anonymous, but it seeks, in a slippery sideways manner, to discover what the children involved think about immigration.

The cleverest question asks 11-year-olds to say why they think there is a shortage of jobs for younger people. One answer on the multiple-choice form is ‘competition from international applicants’.

They are asked to agree or disagree with such statements as ‘I like to be around people from other countries’ and ‘meeting students from other countries is interesting’. They are also invited to say how much they agree or disagree with the statement ‘immigration is bad for the country’.

They are asked if they have close friends from different countries, and how they would speak to a person whose first language isn’t English. And they are asked if immigrants should have the same rights as everyone else, whether they should be encouraged to speak the language of this country or encouraged to continue in their own traditions.

Well, I agree very strongly with the parent who sent this to me because she thought it was sinister probing into the minds of children, and also into her own opinions, none of the business of the school or the State.

Might some little symbol be placed against the name of any pupil who answered in the wrong way? Might it affect that pupil’s future and the attitude of the school towards the parents? If not, what is the educational purpose of this?

There’s no doubt a terrible conformism has infected our system. When I went to speak at Balliol College in Oxford about the restoration of grammar schools, I was met by a smallish, silent crowd holding up placards objecting to my presence there.

Judging from the righteous looks on their faces, they knew they were right. When I asked them to explain their point of view, they said nothing (unless you count one small raspberry). But I was handed two sheets of paper in which I was thoroughly denounced and hugely misrepresented as ‘Transphobic’ and ‘homophobic’.

I was, this indictment said, ‘a figure of hostility and hatred’. It ended in a sort of farce. A young woman positioned herself in front of me, walking slowly backwards while holding up a home-made placard proclaiming ‘History will forget you’. It hasn’t even remembered me yet.

Alas, she was walking backwards towards a large and prickly bush. She was so set on scorning me that she paid no heed when I warned her of her peril, and she duly reversed into it. No shrubs were hurt in the making of this protest, but it put her off her stride.

Still, history repeats itself. And if on this occasion the first time was farce, the next time could be tragedy. Such people will very soon be fanning out into politics, the law and the media. How long before they have the power to silence and punish me and you? Not as long as you think.

*****

Smashing film, shame about the facts

Battle Of The Sexes, the new film about the great tennis player Billie Jean King, is a terrific watch – funny, dramatic, clever and morally satisfying. You come out of the cinema surprised by how long you’ve been there, which doesn’t happen often.

But the more I looked into the actual events portrayed, the more I felt I’d been used and bamboozled. I have to be careful here or the Guardian newspaper will make up more lies about me. So let me say that I admire Billie Jean King as a sportswoman and as a tough campaigner for women’s freedom. I am also pleased she has found happiness in her life with a female partner.

I loathed the condescension and the legal restrictions still inflicted on women in the 1970s, and was personally and politically glad to see them swept away. And if that was all the film celebrated, I’d be content. But it wasn’t that simple. Billie Jean’s husband is rightly shown as a thoughtful and generous man. Yet the girlfriend who introduced Billie Jean to same-sex love is more than slightly idealised.

And another great tennis player of the age, Margaret Court, is portrayed as a sour and crabbed person. Could this be because she disapproved of the sexual revolution and has now become a minister in a very conservative church? I think it may be so.

Also, very little is made of the awkward, unavoidable fact that women’s tennis prospered because it was sponsored by cigarette brand Virginia Slims. Was the cause so good that this sordid bargain was justified?

Slim cigarettes, as far as I know, still kill those who smoke them, and this was no secret in the 1970s. But perhaps most startling of all is the great match which is the climax of the film, when Billie Jean defeats the male-chauvinist braggart Bobby Riggs, so exploding his boasts of superiority.

But you’d never know from the movie that US media have explored, and not disproved, serious claims that Riggs, a habitual gambler with Mafia contacts, deliberately lost the game to pay off a large debt to the Godfather and his boys.

He’d easily beaten Margaret Court. So maybe it wasn’t as conclusive as all that. Why leave this out? Films about factual events, it seems to me, have a duty to stick as close to the truth as possible. Dramatic licence is fine, but not when it puts the audience in the dark about what really happened.

*****

Sailors should stick to their ships

Her Majesty’s bluejackets are not meant to look smart. They are meant to take, burn, sink and destroy the enemy, and scare them the rest of the time.

They can sometimes be compelled into a semblance of spit and polish, but they just look silly and slightly sinister guarding Buckingham Palace.

Armed sailors on the street make me think of Petrograd in 1917 and Berlin in 1918, a sign that mutiny was in the air and order was breaking down.

And why aren’t they in their ships? In this case it is for an almost equally alarming reason – we hardly have any ships any more, at least ships that can be made to move and fight, and aren’t broken down or for sale.

As the number of spare seamen grows, what other unsuitable jobs will the Defence Ministry find for them? Tending the flowers at Kew Gardens?

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01 October 2017 12:53 AM

Do the Government want to lose the Falkland Islands again? They seem to be planning hard for this, or another military humiliation. I am astonished at the lack of outrage and protest over the current vandalism being visited on our Armed Forces.

This sort of behaviour always leads to bad and even tragic results.

Last Sunday my colleague Mark Nicol drew attention to an especially crazy aspect of this, affecting the Royal Navy. I have pointed out here before that the Navy is in a tragic state.

But the latest move is quite straightforwardly mad. HMS Ocean, the current fleet flagship, is so central to the Navy’s operations that the Prime Minister paid a visit to her in the Gulf last December, and spoke warmly to the ship’s company.

She said: ‘Here on HMS Ocean all of you are a vital part of Britain’s global mission… and you can be very proud of everything you are doing.’

All I can say to the Navy is hold on to your tin hats if the PM ever says anything nice to you again. She would have been more honest if she’d just said: ‘Goodbye!’

For, four months after this flag-brandishing oration, Mrs May’s Government put the ‘vital’ HMS Ocean up for sale.

The Brazilian Navy revealed in April that it is close to buying her for about £80 million.

In return for that – a ripple in Whitehall’s ocean of debt – we will lose the only ship we have which can mount a large-scale amphibious operation.

Just how ridiculous is this? In current values, the huge and versatile helicopter carrier cost about £300 million when she was launched from a British shipyard in 1995.

She is not worn out or ancient. In 2014 she completed an 18-month refit costing another £71 million of your money. I am sure the Brazilian Navy will be very grateful that we have taken such good care of her for them. Only weeks ago she was doing useful work in hurricane relief.

I rang the Ministry of Defence. Their once-mighty press office now repels callers by diverting them to an answering machine which takes no messages and cuts you off.

But with much persistence I got through, and asked this simple question: ‘Are you mad?’ I got no proper answer to this query, only some strange bureaucratic babble.

Iam reminded irresistibly of John Nott’s 1981 Defence Review, in which the carrier Invincible was to be flogged off to Australia and the carrier Hermes, along with the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, were to be scrapped. The patrol ship Endurance was to be withdrawn from the South Atlantic.

If the Argentines had the sense to wait for us to complete this money-grubbing scheme, most of the Task Force used to retake the Falklands would have been sold or scrapped, and the Argentine flag would fly over Port Stanley to this day.

I wouldn’t mind so much if the Tories didn’t pretend to be patriotic. You’d understand it if Jeremy Corbyn or Ken Livingstone wanted to do this sort of thing. It would be just as wrong, but it wouldn’t be so creepily dishonest.

Next time you hear Mrs May or any of her Ministers thumping the patriotic tub, think of HMS Ocean.

I have long wanted to settle an old score with Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry but didn’t bother because she seemed to be such a minor figure.

Some years ago, on BBC’s Question Time, she exploded into a purple mist of phoney outrage, claiming falsely that I had stigmatised her as coming from a ‘problem family’.

She announced loudly on TV that she had been raised in a fatherless family on a council estate by a mother on benefits. She implied that her mother had been single. To wild applause, she demanded of me: ‘How dare you say that single parents living in council estates are by definition problem families?’

I’d said no such thing. But I left it at that. But now Ms Thornberry, right, is beginning to loom and swell a bit on the political stage. She could shortly be a Cabinet Minister if the Tories continue to destroy themselves. So we need to know a bit more about her. She thinks so, too, and last week she elaborated on her misery memoir in a Left-wing newspaper.

She didn’t quite say she had to hop to school because she only had one clog. But she did say the Thornberrys were so broke that they had to put down their cats. This is undoubtedly very sad, especially for the cats.

But then, at last, she slipped out the truth about her so-called ‘fatherless family’. It was anything but fatherless. Ms Thornberry’s mother was anything but single.

Little Emily’s tragedy was not the fault of the wicked Tories or of cruel capitalists. It was the work of a bloviating, high-principled human rights obsessive, pro-immigration lobbyist and equality fanatic, Ms Thornberry’s parent, Cedric.

In 1966, two years before deserting his wife and three small children, Cedric Thornberry tried (and failed) to become Labour MP for Guildford. In his campaign leaflet, he posed in front of a marble fireplace, boasting of his family, his Cambridge degree, his legal career and his work for the Foreign Office.

But within a few short months, Cedric Thornberry had betrayed his wife and young children, and fathered a child by another woman. He left them penniless and skedaddled abroad to avoid being forced to take responsibility.

He ended up in a top job at the UN.

In his long absence doing more important things, the council rehoused his family, and Ms Thornberry’s mother Sallie became a much-loved mayor of Guildford. Whatever misfortunes befell young Emily were entirely her father’s doing.

My point is this. Ms Thornberry misleadingly used her misfortune to make cheap propaganda, and she should stop doing that.

And her father brilliantly typifies a certain type of socialist, who thinks he is virtuous because he says all the right things, and who is terribly concerned about the rights of immigrants, but who dumps his own wife and children on the state’s doorstep because he thinks he is too wonderful to bother with the simple task of keeping his promises.

And still we miss the point about Oxford student Lavinia Woodward, who did not go to prison after stabbing her boyfriend.

She wasn’t let off for being posh. She was let off because everyone is let off, all the time.

If Lavinia, pictured left, had been called Kayleigh and been studying GNVQs in Batley, she’d still have been let off.

A brief internet search for the words ‘knife attack’ and ‘spared jail’ found a Burnley ‘alcoholic’ who knifed her partner in the back during a row; it also found a Tyneside mother of five, maddened by cannabis, who stabbed her partner.

And there was a Sheffield man who ‘snapped and lost control’ during a feud with a neighbour, and chased him with a knife.

All were ‘spared jail’. None was posh. In fact, if you just look for the words ‘spared jail’, you’ll be amazed at what you can do and stay free.

But because people believe what they want to, nobody gets the point or does anything.

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20 September 2017 1:40 PM

People sometimes ask if I plan to write a book about my brief time in Moscow (June 1990 to October 1992). I always say that I do not. If I show signs of doing so, I beg you all to tell me to stop. This is for many good reasons. It is mainly because others have already done so miles better than I could, eg. David Remnick’s excellent book ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ from the same period, which I recommend.

I was learning so much, so late, so steeply and so fast that I have only a rushed, scrabbling memory of those times, like a man who has fallen into a river and has then been pulled out of it, gasping, freezing and dazed.

I had long wanted to go to work in Moscow, but had only three months to prepare for the assignment, during which I got a sketchy knowledge of basic Russian from a superb teacher, and very little else. Much of my experience was not especially entertaining or interesting, as I had to spend long days and weeks simply overcoming the practical difficulties of opening a newspaper bureau in a vast unknown city, and then finding a home there for my family. These times were good for my character, and I have no doubt my time in Moscow changed my life. But I wrote little if anything that was distinguished at the time, and was more or less qualified to do the job of reporting from Moscow about the time I left Moscow for the Bering Strait, Alaska and Washington DC in October 1992. I like to think the experience and knowledge it gave me have matured like good wines in a dark, cool cellar, benefiting my understanding of what actually is right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark, up and down, but not till later in life. While I was there, I was a callow and inadequate recorder of events and absorber of experiences.

I also improved my understanding of Russia as she is now, poor thing. I am who I am because I spent those months in Moscow. But that doesn’t mean I spent them especially well, or competently. I shudder, sometimes, to think of opportunities I missed or funked.

The events themselves, apart from a few sharply-lit moments of terror, joy, apprehension, panic, exaltation or hopeless gloom have disappeared into the cupboard of the yesterdays, to which I have no key. In any case, even the abiding memories are unreliable. The last time I went looking for one of my two former Moscow homes, where I lived for more than a year (and which must now be approached by walking past a sex shop, the sort of thing that didn’t feature in Moscow when I lived there), I went to it, as I always had, by Metro. I walked confidently out of the wrong station exit, on to the wrong side of a major street. Either they had moved the station and/or the street, or my memory was wrong. Which do you think it was? What else have I remembered backwards? It’s too late to be sure now.

This was also because I spent far too much time shovelling formulaic ‘news’ to London and far too little (as I suspected then and know for sure now) travelling in the deep USSR or just observing.

And I have just been given an even better reason not to scribble any sort of memoir of those times.

Many people are better-qualified to write about this than I. Among them are reporters who were there when I was, especially Conor O’Clery and Helen Womack, both of whom married Soviet citizens and learned (as I never did) to speak the Russian language properly. I wrote far too briefly here (scroll down)

Now, as a further reason to refrain from a Moscow memoir of my own, I have Angus Roxburgh, a far more distinguished and effective Moscow Correspondent than I ever was. He has just written deeply enjoyable, moving and gloriously honest memoir of many years grappling with Russia. ‘Moscow Calling, Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent’ , Birlinn, Edinburgh. It’s out on Thursday, that is, tomorrow. Please buy it or order it from your local library. I read it more or less right through in three long sittings, separated only by sleep and work. That’s obviously partly because I am personally enthralled by the subject. But it is also because it is a very good piece of writing, moving, evocative, lacking self-importance and full of enjoyable self-deprecation, as well as being gently, drily funny on many occasions.

And if you read it you will grasp why almost anyone, even me, who wanders even into the outer fringes of the great dark, cruel, harsh, emotional forest of Russia and lives amid Russians, with all their generosity of spirit, unexpressed pain and hopeless humour about their plight, tends to fall into a sort of love with the place and people which does not ever afterwards weaken. The pity is that so few of us have this experience, while so many of have such firm and settled views about a place we’ve never seen.

Angus Roxburgh is (how shall I put this?) a little more left-wing than I am now, in politics and instinct. But I was once a bit more left-wing than him, and in those days I viewed the USSR as a disaster for the revolutionary cause. The whole century, it seemed to me, was dominated by this great dark pillar of fire and smoke rising out of Petrograd in 1917 (an actual picture in my mind conjured into being by listening to Beethoven’s 5th symphony , darkening first Europe and then the world with menace, but also worryingly alluring in its power).

I hated the USSR. It appeared to be the proof that my revolutionary ideas were bound to end in blood and tears, but I longed for this not to be true. Hence the Trotskyism, a giant self-delusion that revolution could come without terror and slaughter, and the belief that, had revolution happened somewhere more sensible, we might have done better. A lot of the time I hated Russia as well, blaming its supposedly backward culture and people for the failure of my own beliefs - and so was not especially interested in its music, culture or language. I was rather inclined to think it a barbaric and desolate place, and not really part of civilisation. I continued to think this after I ceased to be a Marxist and retained a different version of it after I became a Cold Warrior in the 1980s. This is a view I no longer hold, though I still believe the USSR was an evil empire, I long ago forsook my Russophobia.

I might have been influenced in this suspicion of Russia by my naval father’s dismal first-hand experiences of Murmansk during his spell on the Russian Convoys in the 1940s, in which he recalled a miserable, squalid place of fear, dirt, ingratitude and sloth. HMS Jamaica’s wardroom, I recalled, had been especially struck by the fate of a Soviet officer who had misbehaved drunkenly while enjoying the hospitality of His Majesty’s Navy, tied up alongside the Murmansk docks . He did not return for a later visit, and it was made pretty plain by shrugs, gestures and mutterings that he had been summarily shot.

So you wouldn’t have caught me listening to Radio Moscow in my bedroom, as Angus did as a Scottish schoolboy in the 1970s. I never learned Russian with idealistic dedication as he did. And I certainly would never have volunteered to live in Moscow while toiling for a Soviet publishing house. I gasp at the courage and resolve of Angus and his young wife Neilian, who did this in the late 1970s long before anyone believed the USSR was on the brink of collapse.

They must be some of the very few Westerners who experienced life as it was in the wilderness of the Moscow suburbs, miles from the Kremlin and the fancy Metro stations, knee deep in mud for much of the year, or surrounded by ice and slush for much of the rest of it, breathing a substance that was quite like air but a lot thicker than I was used to, dependent on the USSR’s faulty distribution system for food and the necessaries of life, learning how to bribe plumbers and keep out the cold with makeshift insulation. One of the opening scenes in a suburban Soviet supermarket, is tremendously evocative for me. In my first months in Moscow, though I had by great good fortune found a lovely place to live, I tried to experience life as far as possible as the inhabitants did.

Of course, it was impossible because we did not know the real rules and mistook the appearance for the reality. But it was also shocking and funny (if you have no sense of humour, do not do these things, is my advice. I spent my entire time in Moscow with my sense of humour turned up to maximum, which is perhaps why I no longer have one). But nothing like as shocking and funny as it was for Angus and his wife, for they (unlike us) could not simply fall back on the expensive hard-currency backup which established foreign correspondents could use.

Here are glorious descriptions of the pleasures and upsets of life in Soviet Moscow, of good friends made, of a ghastly unintended betrayal of one of those friends (not truly damaging but hurtful) because the Roxburghs forgot their Moscow flat was bugged by the KGB, and then found out rather painfully just how bugged it was. (When they got back to Scotland they were equally blatantly bugged by MI5). On pages 102-105 there is a poignant description of the joys of Moscow and of the idiotic formalities his first leave-taking of it, full of love and hate combined, which chimes perfectly with my own experience and feelings.

There is a necessary discussion of the menace only slightly less disturbing and disgusting than the KGB, the revolting massed armies of cockroaches which were (and perhaps still are) the eternal foe of the Moscow flat-dweller. There are descriptions of lovely summer days in the countryside by the Moscow River, of the arrogant privileges of the Moscow elite, of strange and sinister persons who appear mysteriously in the lives of foreigners, of internal emigration and of surveillance, and its dire consequences.

Angus Roxburgh could not stay away from Moscow. I suspect he will never be able to get it out of his mind and soul. By sheer diligence and admirable determination he turned himself into a journalist and then a Moscow correspondent, a far harder task than I faced, as a journalist who had climbed the normal front staircase of training, apprenticeship and national newspapers. His command of Russian made it a far deeper experience than I could ever have, and he got to Moscow in the crucial years *before* 1990, when the real struggles were taking place. I was a latecomer compared to him (these are also reasons why I wouldn’t presume to write a memoir of this sort). Angus Roxburgh’s Russophile leftist sympathies, and his real knowledge of Russian, didn’t endear him to the concrete-headed morons of the then KGB, who actually arranged for him to be expelled from Moscow, not long before I arrived there.

Yet he got back, and stuck it out through Boris Yeltsin’s horrible Chechen war. As he rightly points out, this grisly and savage conflict never bothered the western powers or most of the western media, who were happy to give Boris Yeltsin a free pass, for violence corruption and repression, provided he let the West pillage his country and did not stand up to them over NATO expansion or elsewhere in the world.

In an interesting passage he admits that the BBC, for which he then worked, had been soft on Yeltsin, not for his disastrous ‘reforms’ (which impoverished the people) and his dictatorial shelling of his own parliament. At the time he had rebutted this charge by the Australian left-wing journalist John Pilger. Now he isn’t so sure.

‘We definitely fell into the trap of suggesting (mainly as Pilger indicated, through our choice of words) that despite all the hardship Yeltsin’s reforms were ‘right’ and the democratically elected deputies in parliament, who opposed the reforms, were ‘wrong’.

It’s that point about ‘choice of words’ that I like, and is typical of Angus Roxburgh’s engaging honesty about his actions, his failures, his own life, the other people he describes. There are no fake heroics here, even when he blunders into danger. It is this, together with the very dry humour which lurks in the serious stuff, which makes this such a good book.

He also understands the key thing about Russia, that suffering influences attitudes. Acknowledging that Britain and the USA suffered greatly by any standard in World War Two, he then adds:

In that war ‘Britain had 67,000 civilian deaths, mainland USA none, the Soviet Union 16million. For military deaths the figures are 380,000, 400,000 and around 10,000,000’.

He adds, tellingly’ What we commemorate on Armistice Day each year is the heroism and sacrifices of those who went to war. What they remember in Russia on Victory Day is the indescribable suffering of those to whom war came.’

There is much else of great interest here, personal, political, cultural and moral. I haven’t the space or time to encapsulate it all. But if you want a good, enthralling memoir of the great, raging days of turmoil in Russia and the USSR, as witnessed and recorded by an honest man, this is the one to read.

02 July 2017 1:47 AM

I should have been thrilled by the maiden voyage of the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. I grew up among warships and naval bases and normally love such things. But I wasn’t. Partly it was the fact that, gigantic as she is, she has all the grace and style of a floating hypermarket, or a seaborne car park. When did we forget how to make ships look beautiful?

But much more important was the knowledge that this painfully expensive leviathan is worse than useless. We madly got rid of our Harriers, the only aircraft we had that could have flown from her decks.

An aircraft carrier which has no planes is a metaphor for uselessness, like a pub with no beer, or a car with no wheels. But that is not the most miserable thing about this event.

Even more important, it is almost a century since we were so unprepared, on land, at sea and in the air, for the unpredictable dangers we face. It has, by the way, been Tory governments, which preen themselves for their own supposed patriotism, who have reduced us to our present pitiful state. The Government knows it has done this.

Retired chiefs of all the Armed Services, speaking with immense knowledge and authority, have publicly warned about it in the House of Lords. Such men generally keep quiet. They must be genuinely distressed to have spoken out. What they say openly will be mild compared with the private views of current admirals, generals and air marshals.

So listen to Lord Craig of Radley, former Marshal of the RAF. Recalling how we were able to sustain severe losses in the Falklands and the first Gulf War because of carefully amassed reserves, he said: ‘Losses today, from a very much smaller order of battle than that of the Eighties, on a scale or rate such as those, would all too rapidly decimate our combat power, our resilience and our stamina.’

In other words, we simply do not now have enough kit to cope with a major war.

He added, tellingly, that it is not much use maintaining a nuclear deterrent unless we maintain our conventional strength as well.

Lord West of Spithead, a former First Sea Lord, had still worse news. He was even blunter: ‘The Navy has too few ships and men and is having to make incoherent cuts to keep within the budget.’ Important ships (including the former flagship HMS Ocean) were being paid off, and – astonishingly – we will not even have any surface-to-surface or air-to-surface missiles for the next few years. ‘This is not an abstract issue. For a number of years, we will have ships deployed around the globe that may suddenly come across an opponent because things have escalated, and they will have to fight. I have done this, as have many of us here. We will have ships sunk and people killed. I have been in that position. We are standing into danger.’

Lord West also rightly underlined the Navy’s severe manpower crisis. Years of cuts and skill shortages have made life almost intolerable for experienced men and women, seriously overworked, who have left the service and not been replaced. As for Britannia ruling the waves, forget it. Not long ago, the policy was that we should have roughly 50 major surface ships. Not now. Lord West revealed: ‘We have only 19 escorts. This is a national disgrace for our great maritime nation.’

Remember, these are not the words of some tub-thumper on a street corner, but of a senior naval officer of great knowledge and experience.

But I have not finished. Lord Dannatt, a former head of the Army, joined in the sad chorus. Warning that there were ‘just not enough’ serving soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, he was as plain as his brother officers, he said: ‘We have cut the size of the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force too far.’

Pointing out that one day we would need an army in a hurry, he said: ‘I worry about the number of soldiers that we have – or, particularly, do not have. We are carrying too much risk. The last Government from 2010 and this present Government might get away with it, but the future will catch us out at some point and the verdict of history will be damning.’

These are words that it took some courage to say and are far more important than most of the minor squabbles now dominating much of our political life. We have been warned. Do we act, or do we pretend we have not heard? We will pay for this, or our children will. We are standing into danger.

The discovery that Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News anchorman, is perhaps a bit Left-wing, is an amazing breakthrough of investigative journalism. Next, intrepid reporters reveal that water is wet and fire burns. Surely the interesting story about Channel 4 (and also the entire BBC) is that anyone still seriously pretends they are not Left-wing. And why they do that.

Helen's fearless - shame about her comrades

The best thing now on television is ITV’s Fearless, in which Helen McCrory plays a courageous lawyerwho genuinely fights for her clients.

Refreshingly, it does not portray our vainglorious ‘security’ services as spotless heroes keeping us safe.

No free country should idolise such people as we now tend to do.

Helen McCrory plays a courageous lawyer who genuinely fights for her clients in ITV's fearless

But it is not flawless. In reality, modern Left-wingers aren’t all as keen on freedom as Ms McCrory’s character, who (we are ceaselessly reminded) was once a tiresome Greenham Common ban-the-bomb type.

On the contrary, they’re all fans of ‘safe spaces’, where incorrect opinions are banned. A drama starring a Right-wing defender of liberty would be an original change.

If only Boris would confront a real tyrant

Our leaders bray like foghorns at miniature tyrants with whom we have little or nothing to do, such as Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad. Sometimes they even bomb them.

But when faced with a real despot, who has the power to hurt us, they cringe and, well, kowtow. It is 20 years since China promised us it would maintain the freedoms we left behind in Hong Kong. But China is not keeping its side of the bargain. Freedom of the press, the independence of the courts and the liberty of the education system are constantly being squeezed by Peking’s stooges.

Worse still, people who the Chinese Politburo do not like are brazenly kidnapped in Hong Kong, smuggled across the border into the clutches of Peking’s repressive state, which has never ceased to lock up and persecute free spirits. This is our direct concern. We are not just entitled to protest, but obliged to do so with all the force at our command.

In response, our normally loud Foreign Secretary, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, speaks softly and carries a small stick. Can this be the same macho Mr Johnson who rather noisily supported Donald Trump’s illegal bombing of Syria, in response to unproven claims about poison gas use? It can.

I have a simple suggestion for Mr Johnson and all those like him. If his outrage against menacing despots is genuine, then he should express it to all who deserve it, including the Chinese. If it is not genuine, then can he please shut up, and write another book?

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14 May 2017 1:27 AM

What are they teaching your children? Are they teaching them how to think – or what to think? Worse, are they monitoring you by trapping your children into answering intrusive questions about your private opinions?Do you know? You may think that the crazy ideas of the hard Left are safely contained in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, or the Guardian newspaper.But some recent disturbing letters from parents of school-age children made my stomach lurch. I saw in these accounts the gradually solidifying shape of a nasty new intolerance, state-financed and more or less unavoidable by anyone with school-age children.First of all, for a flavour of the ideas encouraged in our schools, look at a recent competition for ‘gifted pupils’. Let’s say this was ‘somewhere in Southern England’. Its theme was ‘2016: A Pivotal Year In History’, which might seem harmless. But what were the 15-year-olds involved actually doing? The competition brief allowed for a wide range of topics to be covered. Wide? Well, the winners discussed ‘prejudice in 2016’. What prejudice was that? ‘Incidents of hate crime after Brexit, Islamophobia and the media portrayal of these events.’ They also dealt with, yes, ‘gender, religious and racial equality’.Another team in this competition ‘highlighted’ the way in which David Bowie and Prince ‘made people start to question social convention on gender identity’. Others tackled ‘biased slants from certain media corporations’ by which I doubt they meant the BBC, and, of course, ‘climate change’ and immigration, those two tests of correctness and acceptability among the modern Left. Do you see a theme here? You should.For not far away, in a different part of Southern England, another parent tells me that his daughter recently came home from primary school bearing a decorated poster with ALLAH across the middle. That parent says: ‘I have yet to see a similar poster with GOD or JESUS across it.’His son, at a secondary school, is about to visit a mosque. So far there have been no visits to Christian churches. But it goes further than that. At a recent parent-teacher meeting, which discussed ‘refugees’, the head teacher spoke of ‘these dark days’ since the EU referendum.The boy has recently come home from school and – with a note of disapproval in his voice – asked his father: ‘Dad, why do you read the Daily Mail?’ It turns out that a teacher had asked the pupils how their parents had voted for in the referendum, and when one of the pupils said ‘Brexit’, this teacher had responded, in a disapproving tone, by asking: ‘Why did they vote for that?’Let’s not exaggerate. These teachers are not (yet) reporting politically incorrect parents to the authorities. But what worries me is that all the preconditions for surveillance and indoctrination are there. Socially and morally conservative opinions are treated as phobias and heresies. Parents who hold such views are undermined by their children’s teachers.Already, on the excuse of discouraging Islamic extremism, schools are licensed to probe into the minds of their pupils. Once you’ve allowed this for one supposedly ‘extreme’ opinion, it’s not a big shift to move on to others. In the meantime, might these attitudes affect such things as the grading of coursework, job and university applications? I don’t doubt it.Governments come and go, supposedly Left-wing and supposedly Right-wing – though the supposedly Right-wing ones usually turn out to be nothing of the kind. But in the schools, the universities and most of the public sector, the wild Marxist Cultural Revolution quietly continues its long march through the institutions.

Korea's vast statues are nearly as loopy as the Labour manifesto

North Korea has banned foreigners from visiting the two giant idols of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, supposedly because they fear someone will blow them up.This is a pity. During a very strange visit to the world’s weirdest country some years ago, I was able to get very close to these 72ft monstrosities,the objects of actual worship by North Koreans. To see them is to understand just how strange this isolated nation is.My brilliant photographer colleague Richard Jones asked me to stroll past them, so cleverly showing just how vast they are.I learned much on the trip, but two things linger above all. One was plentiful evidence that many North Koreans are drunk a lot of the time (and who can blame them?) The other was a weird street of shops, without staff or customers, offering peculiar, inexplicable ranges of goods.My favourite displayed, in the same window, motorbikes, cornflakes and tinned sardines.I was reminded of this when I saw the Labour manifesto, which contains attractive items, such as railway nationalisation, along with intolerable crazy rubbish such as votes at 16.But the Tories should be careful about saying Labour is offering a return to the 1970s. I know quite a lot of people who look back on the 1970s with growing fondness, apart from the flared trousers and the hairstyles.

Can I have a large fried with that, officer?

How strange the police of a nation which doesn’t play baseball have adopted the baseball cap as official headgear. To me, it’s as odd as if New York cops started patrolling Fifth Avenue in cricket whites. The only person who looked good in a baseball cap was the late Princess Diana, but she would have looked wonderful in dungarees and steel-toe-capped boots. Everyone else who dons one instantly looks stupider than he or she did before. Quite recently the Royal Navy adopted these garments for official wear, though, since we have hardly any ships capable of putting to sea, I’ve seen no sign it has actually caught on. Imagine Horatio Nelson, lying dying in HMS Victory, in a baseball cap. Now Northamptonshire Police are abandoning traditional helmets and wearing what they call ‘bump caps’ – lightly armoured baseball headgear which make them look as if they are working in a hamburger drive-thru. The official excuse is a hope that the new hat ‘will remove a barrier to the non-binary transgender community joining the police service’. No doubt it will do this. But I can’t imagine it will increase their already diminished authority, as they go out among the Friday-night drunks and dope-smokers doing whatever it is the modern police actually do (you tell me). I think we can expect cries of ‘Can I have fries with that?!’ as they sidle, embarrassed, through the seething streets.Old-fashioned plain, severe uniforms existed for a reason. They conveyed authority. The new ones communicate an ingratiating matiness, which – when it fails to please – is forced to turn instead to the use of Tasers and clubs.

Afghanistan

Can we really be planning to send more troops to Afghanistan, the most foolish and futile military and political mistake of modern times? It’s just for training, apparently. Well, last time it was going to happen without a shot being fired, until the sad convoys of flag-wrapped coffins began to come back.

Telephone directory enquiries

The next time anyone tells you about how market forces drive prices down, just ask them to explain what happened to telephone directory enquiries. A call to these monsters of greed – free under the old, despised GPO – will hit you for at least £8.98 from one provider, and can now cost almost £24 for less than a minute. The main victims of this outrage are the old, who can’t cope with the internet. Sorry, but the market just isn’t a substitute for morality and human decency.

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19 March 2017 12:41 AM

I wonder if the Tories are beginning to wish they had not tried quite so hard to win the 2015 Election. Think of all the mess and humiliation they would have been spared if they hadn’t.

I do not think they won it ‘fairly and squarely’, as David Cameron ludicrously said on Thursday. I don’t think he thinks so either, really. And things which are wrongly come by tend to turn to dust and ashes in the hands of those who have schemed to get them.

So it is in this case. I have long believed that Mr Cameron did not intend or expect to win a majority. He wanted a second coalition, which could cast aside his insincere promise to hold an EU referendum and his impractical pledge to freeze taxes and National Insurance.

Now look what has happened – the most ridiculous government in modern history, flailing about as it tries to obey a referendum verdict it hates, and abandoning its Budget within hours of issuing it.

The silly manifesto the Tories threw together in 2015 was never meant to be put into action and has been nothing but trouble. I wonder what other nasty surprises are lurking in its yellowing pages.

A sour and persistent smell, like the whiff from a neglected fridge, now hangs over the Government. The £70,000 fine imposed on the supposedly professional Tory Party, for blatantly breaking Election rules, may only be the start of an enormous landslide of scandal and embarrassment, dragging on for years to come and reaching into very high places.

I cannot ever remember this country feeling so much like a Latin American banana republic. All we need to complete the picture is some bananas, and some hyper-inflation.

And who knows if we cannot contrive that, too? After the 2008 crash, the Queen asked why nobody saw it coming. Well, after the next crash, which is just a matter of time, perhaps I will be here to tell her that I saw it coming. Anyone who can count can see it coming, if he wants.

And the mess we are making of leaving the EU may help that along. How much are we going to have to pay to get access to the Single Market we could have stayed in by joining the European Economic Area?

How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence.

'How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence'

This is false toughness. English foot-stamping does not go down well in today’s Scotland. The last thing we should do is encourage an emotional campaign based on wounded pride rather than on hard facts.

What if it goes wrong and there is an overwhelming unofficial vote to leave? Surely a better approach would be to be as generous as possible, to say: ‘Of course you must be free to vote. We are friends who have fought alongside each other for centuries, and trust each other completely. And if you really wish to go, that is your affair. That is the kind of people we are. But we hope that you won’t and will always welcome you back if you change your minds.’

As for Ireland, I simply cannot see why the Government is so complacent about the seething crisis that is building up there over the prospect of a nightmare hard border from Warrenpoint to Londonderry. There is real danger here, and it had better be faced soon.

The pathetic tale of HMS Dunroamin

The woeful state of Her Majesty’s Navy is a national shame. Every government that has failed to keep up the strength of the Fleet has paid for it in the end, and it is ridiculous for a trading nation such as we are to neglect seapower.

The mean folly of Labour and Tory governments is now doing lasting damage to both Army and Navy, sawing into their very bone to save money. The crucial thing that is being lost is the accumulated experience of centuries, passed on by a solid core of trained men. If this goes on, we’ll end up with as much Naval tradition and prowess as Luxembourg.

And the shortage of skilled sailors has now led to the inexcusable waste of a £1billion stealth warship, HMS Dauntless.

The immensely expensive Type 45 destroyer, which went into service in 2010, hasn’t moved an inch under her own power for a whole year. She is stuck, tied up at her Portsmouth berth.

She is officially described as a ‘training ship’, a role normally taken by worn-out and obsolete vessels. A Navy statement lamely insists the ship is still ‘very much part of the fleet… an important part of our drive to improve training and career opportunities’.

I think we may need to change our ship-naming policy. Away with the romantic titles of old. Instead we can have HMS Motionless, HMS Deficit, HMS Mothballs and HMS Dunroamin.

The West kills civilians just like 'evil' Putin

In what important way is the West’s bombing of Mosul, now going on, different from Russian bombing of Aleppo last December?

In both cases, heavily armed and ruthless Islamist fanatics have used civilians as human shields as they fight to the finish in thickly populated city streets and backyards.

In both cases, innocent civilians have, regrettably, died or been badly injured in the bombardment. In Mosul, estimates are that at least 300 civilians have already died during Western air attacks on Islamic State positions.

Most of us would accept, with a heavy heart, that this is the horrible price we have to pay for the defeat of IS. But when Russian forces did the same in Aleppo, the action was denounced almost everywhere as a hideous and deliberate war crime.

What’s the reason? In my view, it’s propaganda – and some of the media’s gullible willingness to believe it. IS’s close cousins, the bearded zealots of the Al-Nusra Front, used sophisticated techniques to persuade journalists (almost all far away from the scene) that the Russians were the bad guys.

So we ended with democratic, Western media, normally busy denouncing Islamist extremism, giving sympathetic coverage to some of the worst jihadists in the world. When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.

*******

Why should Hollywood Royalty be 'nervous?

Apparently the actress Angelina Jolie ‘confessed to feeling a little nervous’ as she arrived to give her first lecture as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. I can’t think why. Hollywood Royalty, like Rock Royalty, are surrounded by automatic fawning and applause, much as actual aristocrats used to be worshipped by servile snobs in the old days. Embarrassed, perhaps. Nervous, never.

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23 October 2016 1:59 AM

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp. Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims. I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them. Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them? Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness? And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.So what are these enormous, prematurely aged children fleeing from? Why must they come here? And then, while the self-righteous pro-migrant faction are failing to answer these questions (they cannot), along comes somebody to compare these events with the 1938-1940 Kindertransport trains which carried Jewish children out of the reach of Hitler. Baloney. The comparison is false and, in my view, disgraceful because it diminishes the horror of the past to make a cheap propaganda point about the present. After the highly public Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, in which Jews under Nazi rule were lawlessly murdered, beaten, robbed and dragged off to prison camps without trial because they were Jews, nobody had any excuse for not helping Jews to leave the Third Reich. Mass murder was plainly the next step. These were real refugees from actual persecution (and it remains our shame that we allowed only the children in, leaving their parents behind to be slaughtered). Look at the pictures from this era. The children involved have been torn from families, in many cases seen their homes defiled or torched, their parents obscenely humiliated in front of them. Yet somehow they remained children. Pity and mercy are precious things, qualities given to us to keep us human. Those who seek to exploit these emotions for political ends, to play upon real feelings for fake purposes, have much to answer for.

This is NOT justice - it's a witch hunt

The Great Child Abuse Inquiry continues to devour itself, in a storm of rumour and whispers. There is some justice in this.

The whole idea that this country is waist-deep in unprosecuted abuse scandals has always been based on allegations that cannot be objectively proved. Now this industry is the target of its own methods.

The whole country has become a vast kangaroo court, in which guilty and innocent alike are accused, and in many cases we can never find the truth.

For a year, I have been fighting the case of the late Bishop George Bell, whose courage and principle I have long admired, who was suddenly accused of long-ago child abuse by a solitary complainant, 57 years after his death. No other accusers have come forward.

To begin with, his own church, aided by several newspapers, the BBC and the police, acted disgracefully as if his guilt was proven. The police even said they would have arrested him if he hadn’t been dead, an absurd and meaningless statement which persuaded many he was guilty.

Now, thanks to relentless pressure by many good people, plus me, the BBC have honourably retreated, the police have softened their line, and the Church themselves have published a booklet about Chichester Cathedral in which they admit that the charges against Bishop Bell have never been tested in any court and are just ‘plausible’, a feeble word given that the accusation, if true, would strip away his good name for ever.

It’s not enough. But it took all the running we could do just to stay in the same place, returning to the old English custom that all are presumed innocent until guilt is proven. If the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary could grasp this point, their hopeless inquiry could be shut down before it soaks up the entire national budget and we could go back to proper British justice.

The best summary of what is wrong with our selection-by-wealth comprehensive school system comes from a campaigner against Kent’s excellent if oversubscribed surviving grammar schools.

One of her children didn’t pass the test. Her reaction? ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me. We shopped at Waitrose.’

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk.

No wonder, given that most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors.

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful?

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

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This was a dramatized documentary ‘A Very British Deterrent’ which , with actors impersonating several leading figures, examined the events leading up to the Nassau Agreement, basis of our ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent.

The programme was made by BBC Scotland, and plainly has a strong interest in the siting of nuclear forces in Scotland, very unpopular there then and since, for understandable reasons. But I must confess (and here open myself to the jibes of better-read readers) that I had not previously heard many of the details of the dealings between Harold Macmillan and Dwight Eisenhower, and then between Macmillan and John F. Kennedy.

The hopeless failure of the foredoomed Blue Streak rocket is broadly known. So is the failure of the air-launched Skybolt missiles with which the USA offered to supply us to cover our nuclear nakedness in the post-Sputnik era.

But I have never before seen details of the pressure placed on the British government to allow the basing of US nuclear missile submarines in the Holy Loch, never heard of the RB-47 incident(similar to the U2 incident which is world famous, but different because the plane was based in the UK, see here http://sw.propwashgang.org/rb47.htm ) and had never seen anything like so much detail of the Nassau talks themselves, in which the Anglo-American alliance very nearly unravelled altogether, and Harold Macmillan more or less admitted that it was ridiculous for Britain to try to maintain itself as a nuclear power. I suppose so many of these things are *known* to specialists and close readers of memoirs and official histories, but not to the rest of us. It is rather shaming.

What little I did know about Nassau had always puzzled me. How had we managed to get something so large – American Polaris missiles, which we would fit with warheads and house in our own submarines, out of the Americans? I didn’t know they tried to fob us off, even at that stage, with what they themselves described as a turkey, the failed Skybolt project, nor how direct Kennedy was in trying to make it explicit that we would have no real control over Polaris missiles.

I also note the involvement of US Admiral Arleigh Burke, who long-term readers here will have met before in 1956, advising the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that if he really wants to stop the Suez operation, then he will have to order the US Navy to ‘blast’ the Royal Navy.

The programme is a bit CND-tinged for me, though this gives the excuse for an annoyingly short clip of Bertrand Russell speaking, a sight and sound I can never tire of. But it is a fine piece of historical documentary work, illustrated with some rare, evocative film, and some intelligent and (so far as I can see) truthful dramatisation of real events, only undermined by needless music trying to tell us to be alarmed, excited, suspicious, etc.

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09 April 2015 4:27 PM

It must be 20 years since I watched a British-launched Trident missile leap from the sea off the coast of Florida, and begin its long journey downrange across the Atlantic. It was an astonishing sight – the rockets are belched from their pods in the submarine by a blast of ‘gas and steam’, which appears in a plume, as from nowhere, then hang, apparently suspended, actually fighting gravity, while their rocket motors ignite in mid-air and blast them off into the far heaven.

I viewed the whole thing from a US Navy warship, the launch clearly being in most respects a US operation, and we were pursued and harried throughout the day by a Greenpeace vessel, which failed in its aim of disrupting the launch.

That evening, back in Cocoa Beach, near Cape Canaveral, I watched HMS Vanguard slipping back to port, her mission accomplished. In the twilight, the huge boat (these beasts are as big as Channel steamers, underneath) looked extraordinarily menacing, black, sleek and secretive ( I once spent a weekend mainly submerged aboard one of her predecessors, the Polaris submarine HMS Repulse, but chances to see inside the Trident boats are very hard to come by).

But in those days I still believed ( and indeed was prepared to spout) the justification that if Saddam Hussein and North Korea were developing such bombs, we needed one too. Though I do recall thinking even as I said it that it really wasn’t anything like as good a case as I had often keenly made for Polaris during the Cold War. That case – that the existence of those weapons kept the Soviet Army from moving one inch further westwards, for fear of what they might start - was, I still think, pretty good.

And it still seems to me that, having spent so many billions of our nuclear weapons capacity, we would be foolish to abandon it altogether. The question is really what kind of weapon would be convincing and useful in our hands. Against major nuclear powers with vast land areas, such as China, Russia and the USA, our ‘deterrent’ simply isn’t one. Our small and densely-populated island could be devastated by a very small number of nuclear strikes, in a way we couldn’t hope to replicate against such powers, even assuming that our submarines are as well-hidden as we like to think and aren’t sunk in the first few seconds of war against other naval powers. I mean, if the Russians or the Chinese had learned how to track our Trident subs, they wouldn’t let on, would they? But acoustic technology never ceases to improve.

Mutual Assured Destruction, in such cases, isn’t available to us. We’re too small. They’re too big. It wouldn’t be credible as a threat, let alone effective as an action.

We could only hope to deter attacks from far smaller threats. And for that we simply don’t need a Cold War armoury of submarines

If it comes to the point where nuclear threats from big powers are real, we can’t deter them with Trident. Mind you, try as I may to imagine the circumstances in which this might matter, I cannot.

This is now a problem for those who want to keep Trident. Paradoxically, it was the problem of the disarmers in the Cold War. They had to try to hide the fact that deterrence works, and that it was extremely unlikely that there would have been a nuclear exchange. Both the favourite films of ban-the-bombers in that era , ‘ The War Game’ and ‘The Day After’, are very vague and feeble about how such a war would actually start. They only get into their stride once it comes to portraying the horrors that would follow once it had started.

I found this an effective point, when, as a NATO enthusiast, I used to go along and argue the case for the bomb at CND meetings in the 1980s, at which ‘The War Game’ would be shown. It was also interesting to see the effect when I pointed out that the bombs they had just seen exploding over the English countryside were *Soviet* weapons, whose deployment and use they could not influence, rather than the British and American ones about which they were protesting.

Perhaps some of my readers might like to construct a realistic and credible set of circumstances, in which Britain might find a nuclear weapon useful in the post-Cold War world. I’m prepared to accept that there might be one, which is why I'd keep some warheads and some means of delivery . But I wouldn’t make my whole defence budget and strategy revolve around it. But I wouldn’t be especially keen on Trident, designed as it is, and immensely expensively and cleverly designed, to evade Moscow’s anti-missile screen, when Moscow is (in my opinion) inconceivable and incredible as a target. I struggle more and more to think of what sort of target, in the absence of the USSR’s huge Cold War armies against which we were otherwise defenceless, , could be conceivable or credible. This is mainly because I can see no military logic in it, but partly because, having visited a (Soviet) atmospheric nuclear testing site, I am rather well aware of what these weapons actually do.

I would also want it to be genuinely independent, which I don’t believe Trident to be. Trident is almost wholly dependent on the USA, for the manufacture of the rockets and their maintenance, and (I believe, though this is disputed) for the targeting satellite systems on which their accuracy depends. I was once on the edges of a vast row which blew up when an unwise civil servant suggested to a group of Defence reporters that Trident missiles were, in effect, leased from the USA and not ours at all. Because it was true, but politically unwelcome that our national virility symbol was not actually ours at all, that statement got all kinds of people into desperate trouble.

So I urge caution about the row which has been stirred up by my old mate Michael Fallon (I covered his first by-election, before he had a single grey hair, and have always enjoyed his dry humour and lack of soppy sentimentality) .

The bomb isn’t the same issue it was back in the 1980s, when Mr Fallon and I first met. Perhaps the clearest sign of that is that, then rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen Cold Warrior, am now rightly defying conventional wisdom among my peers by being a keen opponent of the New Cold War.

But there are other differences, notably the vanishing into the air of the giant GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) which once lay so heavily on East German territory that you feared that cramped country might sink under the weight. I recall that too. Venture into the East German countryside and you couldn’t move for them, grinding about in their lorries and shaking the buildings with their sonic booms, occupying huge tracts of land for their tanks and heavy artillery. I think it was the biggest ever to exist in Europe. It’s gone, utterly and completely, and it isn’t coming back. Nor is the Warsaw Pact.

So a renewal, at a cost of at least £20 billion over perhaps 12 years, is quite a commitment, and really needs to be discussed without political rancour. Plenty of serious defence experts reckon the money could be better spent – if our objective is the defence of these islands.

I suspect they are right. What’s funny is that the Labour Party which opposed nuclear weapons when we really needed them, is now probably even more afraid than the Tories of having a sensible discussion on them, when the need for them is in fact hard to demonstrate.